To A Friend On Her 42nd Birthday

Gina Barreca

August 29, 1999|By GINA BARRECA

Dearest Nancy,

So you're coming up on your 42nd birthday. Want to know what it feels like, birthday girl?

Here goes: If the Beach Boys can still be the Beach Boys and not the Beach Men, I can call myself a woman in the prime of her life, at least while I'm speaking to you. It is a funny number, what with edging into middle age with real seriousness and all, but I'm still thinking that I'm not as old as I thought my parents were when they were 42. Their 42 was remarkably different from ours, which is why, in part, we don't know how to do this, why there's no instruction manual on getting older for us.

They were older at 42 than we are and that's not just wishful thinking or denial, that's a fact, a bona fide genuine difference. Remember the great movie Marty? (Either version the one with Ernest Borgnine or the one with the original actor, Rod Steiger.) In Marty, his Italian mother says, ``I'm 54 years old, I have strength in my hands, I want to cook, I want to clean'' Fifty-four years old she is meant to be in that movie, for goodness sake, and on her way to the Home for Astonishingly Old Folks.

I don't think of 54 as old, and not only because that's how old Michael is, Michael who still acts 17. But our parents' generation did indeed consider the mid-fifties to be over the hill. And perhaps they were right because for them it meant they were of the older generation, that they had fully lived their lives. And so there's a legacy about age and fear and the ending of life that we need to shake off, like a dog shaking off rain, mud, or garbage. This isn't ours, even if we've rolled around in it, are covered with it, and smell of it (are you loving this extended metaphor, or what?). We're not as old as they were at the same number because we are more privileged. Just luckier, in part because we were smart enough to get born to these generous and good parents.

Now maybe you don't have this same baggage with your family since they are busier, fitter, and more energetic than we are most days. But my mother (as we all know) died when she was 47 but think about it47. That's about 15 minutes from how old I am now. That's not enough time to pack, that's the middle of the first half of the second act, that's a walk-on part in life, a cameo appearance.

So maybe all that gave me a kind of rush on time, a sense that I better get my butt in gear (charming phrase, I know) if I'm going to get anything done, leave anything behind me at all, and that's fueled the writing and the speaking and teaching all of which have accelerated in order to compensate for having no children of my own, a need to make an impression another way, through words, through people writing to me telling me my work has made a difference.

This is no brag, it's a way of figuring out how to justify my life: I get mail from young women writing their dissertations in secret in South Africa or Iran or China or Korea, who don't have access to my academic stuff on feminist theory or metaphor or whatever and I send it to them in plain brown wrappers (honest) because if they really want this, I can't imagine a better reason to keep doing it. These are other women's daughters and if I can play a small role in their lives, I am grateful. My ``kids,'' my students at UConn, also make this kind of difference in my life. They call or come by to talk about their lives, long after they graduate, and they give their babies' my name as a middle name for luck, and that's pretty good. I'll take it and call myself lucky and mean it, too.

And that's part of the business of being 42, I guess, which is figuring out what counts for real and not just the stuff that you know ``should'' count, but what keeps you doing what you do every day. I would have wished some other things for myself but some are not within my reach. I've made peace with that; I don't fall asleep hungry for what will never appear on my menu. I did that for about six years and that's all I could stand; it was make peace or drive myself and everyone I love totally nuts. The decision was clear, although it was never easy.

Now you've always and forever seemed to me to have a different take on age and getting older that you've had Grandma Moses on the mind where I've had my Mom, and believe me I like your vision a whole lot better. Tell me if that changes in any way. Let me know how to look toward the horizon with even more hope than I've managed to squirrel away. Tell me. I've told you everything I can think of.